Haneke's remake lost in translation

March 14, 2008|By Michael Phillips, TRIBUNE CRITIC

'FUNNY GAMES' **

Your average multiplex patron does not stroll up to the box office, plunk down a couple of fivers and say, "I'll take one ticket for the merciless, punishing critique of violence in the media and our benumbed complicity in its ill effects." Austrian writer-director Michael Haneke's stubbornly faithful (though not precisely shot-by-shot, as widely reported) remake of his 1997 German-language film "Funny Games" will therefore not pose much of a financial threat to "Never Back Down," though if you think about it, those two films work nicely together. The PG-13 "Never Back Down" stokes your blood lust while kicking you in the face; the R-rated "Funny Games" ties you to a chair and lectures you about how awful movies like "Never Back Down" really are.

Both versions of "Funny Games" force the audience to eat it, really eat it, and while they're eating it, to think about the mechanics and the narrative tropes of a typical revenge drama. The '97 original worked better, for reasons partly relating to language; in the English-language remake, the actors seem to have learned some of the more stilted passages phonetically. Nothing sounds "real," even before the guns and the knives come out. For about 20 minutes you're uneasy in the right ways. Then it's a trip down memory lane to Theater of Cruelty of the 1960s, and if you've never been there before, the icy manipulations and humorlessly playful structure of "Funny Games" will take you there, like it or not.

In the remake Naomi Watts and Tim Roth play the central, complacently bourgeois couple, the sort of folks who always come up for torture in a Haneke picture. (His previous film, the superb and vexing "Cache," was just straightforward enough in its set-up to seduce a wider audience, and ultimately just puzzling enough to alienate Haneke newcomers twice over.) Ann, George and their son Georgie (Devon Gearhart) are driving to their lake home with their boat on a trailer. Settled in and puttering around her kitchen, Ann's visited by an alleged friend of one of the neighbors. He's a sweet, polite, thick-headed young man in tennis whites, played by Michael Pitt. He's there to borrow some eggs. Five minutes later, his cohort (Brady Corbet), the smart one, also in white, comes by to visit. Then people and animals start getting whacked around with golf clubs, sometimes on-camera, mostly off. Haneke insists on showing us the aftermath, often in long, static takes.

Haneke may have it in for bourgeois complacency along with bourgeois moviegoing expectations, but "Funny Games" is fundamentally a bourgeois exercise in authorial sadism. As the methodical games grind on, the suffocatingly beige and white surroundings start to look like a mausoleum. The key shot in both versions of "Funny Games" is a close-up of a blood-spattered television in the living room. It's memorable in its way, though utterly devoid of human life.

The writer-director was born in Bavaria and raised in Austria, and he has said he intended the first "Funny Games" as "a kind of counter-program to 'Natural Born Killers,'" offering no catharsis, no conventional audience satisfaction, no gratifying reversals or revenge killings. At the same time Haneke claims he intended "Funny Games" as "in part a parody of the thriller genre." It won't seem like a parody to most American audiences. Scored to ironically soothing Handel and screaming John Zorn passages, this is a hostage drama very different from "The Desperate Hours." The "Hostel" crowd won't like it, and neither will most of those hostile to "Hostel."

At heart, "Funny Games" is a stern rebuke to everyone who laughed a little too loudly at the scene in Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction" where the man in the back of the speeding car gets blasted all over the upholstery. Morally, he's right; cinematically and dramatically in "Funny Games," he's a bit of a pill. The differences between the two versions of "Funny Games" are telling. In the original the louche young sociopaths turned to the camera at odd moments and treated the viewers as their partners in crime. This happens in the remake less often, I think. Yet without the Brechtian ironies, what good is this thing?

I don't know if any major director -- and Haneke certainly is that, despite his willful waterboarding of the audience -- can create something of real value when settling for such a blatant photocopy of an earlier work. So why does a comparative lark such as "Cache" work its own games so insinuatingly? Because it is not an exercise, or a theatrical contraption. It's a film with its own sureness of tone and sense of the unknowable. By contrast "Funny Games," the U.S. remix, is just a dubious idea fulfilled.

Written and directed by: Michael Haneke; photographed by Darius Khondji; edited by Monika Willi; production design by Kevin Thompson; produced by Chris Coen and Hamish McAlpine. A Warner Independent release.